110+ Top Bloggers And Entrepreneurs Share Their Most Successful Social Media Actions

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this concept, think of it like having a bunch of top bloggers all doing a guest post on the same subject, in the samearticle. So, instead of learning the opinion of only just one guest blogger, we get to learn from 110 experts! To do better, you would need to take several training classes.

Now you may be wondering, “Just who are these experts?”. Well, all of them are successful bloggers, entrepreneurs and rising stars who are very active on their blog and on social media.

But how this expert round-up come to life? I’m so glad you asked.

After I did my latest expert round up post, I asked John Lee Dumas (who makes awesome podcasts atEOFire.com) what he thought would be an interesting question to ask top experts about blogging. His answer was the following question:

What was your most successful social media action that gained the most traction?

Social media is indeed crucial for any blogger who wants to attract new readers and engage with their audience.

Thank you, John, for such a great idea. You’re in the#1 pole position today!

~ Don is a strategic marketing coach, consultant, blogger and speaker. He helps businesses create inspiring brands and messages that identify with their audiences. You can find his Facebook page here.

Over the years I’ve experimented with a lot of different social media strategies and in the last several months I’ve seen significant growth and traction with Twitter and Facebook.

Allow me to start with Twitter.

Over the last four months I have doubled my followers and increased sales 25% with the following strategy.

When someone follows me I have made it a habit to check out their Twitter page and then their website.

The first place I head to from their Twitter page is their blog where I will intentionally look for a blog article that is relevant and interesting to me.

I generally glance through the first three or four articles and when I find one I like, I leave an in-depth, relevant, hi-quality comment and share it out to my Twitter feed with a tag to their Twitter handle.

I will also see where else they are connected on social media and share it out there as well and tag them to let them know I saw their article and I commented on it.

While this strategy is a little time consuming I have made some incredible business connections, new referral partners and over a few month period of engaging with them I’ve earned significant business.

On the other hand, Facebook has been a huge experiment that is paying big dividends.

For a few years we’ve heard that engagement is the key to getting our page feeds seen.

But over the last few months numbers have continued to drop even with engagement. So, I decided to get adventurous.

Late last fall I started creating a video per day that was three to four minutes in length and I uploaded each video straight to Facebook.

For this strategy to work for you, you will have to upload your videos straight to Facebook instead of posting a link from YouTube.

Here is the key to my success… your video must:

Solve one specific problem that is highly relevant to the audience

For one person

And offer one solution

If your video does more than that it will be too lengthy and most of your followers won’t be inspired to watch the full video.

After uploading the video to my fan page, I share it directly to my personal page and a Facebook group page that I run.

When appropriate I will tag those who are included in the video or who were at an event I spoke at. This exposes the video to all of their Facebook friends since it puts it in their feed and personal wall.

There are also a number of people over the last six months I’ve connected with who run some amazing Facebook groups that also share my videos to their groups or ask me to share the videos to their group.

The average video on my Facebook page has over 500 people organically reached within 2 weeks.

Here are two recent posts where one is over 4,800 and the other 2,500.

This propelled my organic post reach to over 5,000 people a week with only 1,150+ Likes to date.

Other posts I created that are text or image based get an average of 50 – 60 people organically reached. If you want to gain serious organic traction with your Facebook page then video is the way to go.

From December 1st through January 31st, these Facebook videos have earned me over $20,000 in consulting and coaching revenues.

If you want social media success, get really clear about what business you are “really” in and then create relevant content that your audience wants.

I use facebook to build a more personal relationship with other bloggers. Also, I found that facebook groups are really valuable, I’m in A LOT of blogging groups and it’s very helpful.

I learn so much from the questions and answers that other bloggers have. The few times when I asked something on facebook group I noticed that people are very responsive and they gave me a big help.

David Hartshorne mentioned the fact that he follows people on twitter, because they usually follow back. I never do that. I don’t follow people just because they followed me. I follow just a handful of influencers with which I interact very often sharing their content.

For the people that share my posts, I do the same like Don Purdum: say thank you, go on to their twitter profile, share the pin post (it must be the most important if they pin it). I check their blog and share something that resonates with me. Also, I like to send funny GIFs.

So, although I don’t follow back, I do share my followers posts. By not following back I may lose some followers that will unfollow me in a couple of days, but I keep my newsfeed clean, and I can pay attention to the people that I really want to connect.

I do make some exceptions: the other days I just followed a complete stranger because I saw that she pined this post. If she likes my work so much, then she deserves a favor.

I recently started to be more active on google+. I recommend you check Dustin W. Stout’s blog because he has many articles in which he reveals the power of g+.

I think that people share my posts and follow me because I try to bond and create a relationship with my reader and they feel that.

~ Oleg is the CEO at MobiDev, a software development company that’s focused on mobile apps, websites and web services, and complex solutions for mobile startups and established companies.

One of the most effective actions was promoting a technical article about PhoneGap and its specifics (PhoneGap: How To Create One App For All Platforms), and it was really hot where we promoted it – on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Quora. It was extremely popular for quite a while, given our experience in making cross-platform software.

We’ve had similar successes with other technical articles, because many developers around the world are wishing and willing to absorb useful knowledge and create great software products.

We share this passion and are always glad to support other developers with our own experience and expertise in various aspects of software development.

We love social media, so we’re surely not going to stop. Our team quickly embraces and masters new technologies, and we keep creating useful materials for software product owners.

Our articles, guides, and reports clarify the specifics of our work and the subtleties that even an experienced product owner might not know.

We did not use any advanced media strategies for promotion, we relied on the power of sharing. We were simply giving valuable knowledge to people who needed it – and we’ll keep promoting our materials in the future, aiming at even bigger successes.

~ Colin is a full-time internet marketer and entrepreneur. He provides consulting services in the area of internet marketing and business development.

Difficult to pin-point just one action, as there are so many techniques for different circumstances.

Certain ‘actions’ might work gangbusters in some niches and be a flat pancake in others, so I have picked two that come to mind, that will work in basically any niche.

The first is to use retargeting for visitors to your site who did not join. You can automate this with a Facebook pixel.

The ad you then present them with is a simple images with some benefits and a link to your site in the text, and in the image and/or text, telling them ‘Like, Share and Comment to win a free copy’ (or free access or whatever applies).

This works very well for boosting social media engagement as they are interested in your product by for whatever reason didn’t get to buying, so you are giving them a chance to win free access by sharing it with others who might be interested in buying. This also provides great brand reinforcement.

Another one is expert roundups. We have done a few on our brand new blog that we are launching as an Authority SEO Blog to get the ball rolling, like this one which has over 730 shares so far.

Also, this answer of mine is on a round up too and you can bet that when this post goes live, I will be sharing it with my personal blog subscribe which is clear proof that this method works, as I will be contributing traffic and social shares to this post myself (as will all the other ‘experts’ I’m sure).

This works in any niche, because the people being asked to share their experiences generally have way above the average understanding of the topic, so the content is really valuable for the visitors as well, helping the post go viral.

1. Begin with a topic that will be of genuine interest to readers. Use Buzzsumo to gauge the popularity of your possible topics and check the kind of posts that have been written about it.

Find an angle that has already not been covered. I noticed that a lot has been written on procrastination, but there were no notable roundups on the topic.

2. Determine the kind of post that you want to write – a roundup, an ultimate guide, use Brain Dean’s skyscraper technique, etc. You will need to create a piece of content that is genuinely compelling.

I want to emphasize here that the quality of your content is the most important piece of this entire process. If it’s good, influencers will share it. If it’s not, they probably won’t want to.

3. I already had a list of influencers for my niche – productivity. They included well-known entrepreneurs, CEOs of productivity app companies, productivity experts, coaches and bloggers in the self-improvement space.

I had complied that list over time and had pre-existing relationships with many of them. If you don’t have a list of influencers, you can use a tool Like Ninja outreach or Buzzsumo to figure out who the influencers are in that space.

Ideally you should follow these influencers on twitter and slowly build up a relationship with them. This might take time, but keep in mind that you are building long term relationships, not doing a one-time interaction.

4. Email your post to all the influencers. You can include a sharable link in your email so that it makes it easier for them to share it on their networks.

You can also use a tool like Contentmarketer.io which automates the process of mentioning them in a tweet. If your content is great, they will share it, and some of them will do it multiple times!

Once again, my number 1 takeaway from this entire exercise is that success on social media depends on the quality of the content.

The key is to create various social media updates where you tag the person who participated in the roundup as well as a link to the post they were in. With my post over 500 tools, I simply tagged at least 3 or so tools that were mentioned in the post as part of the update.

Tagging participants often leads to retweets and favorites of the update which helps expand the reach of the post.

Now, for me this is not a “one and done” process. Instead I have a pool of social media updates tagging various participants that get sent out again and again over time to various social media accounts/channels.

In order to do this, I am using a tool I have been working on, Bulkly to help automate and manage this process as well as other ongoing social media updates.

This allows updates to be posted at various days and times to help spread out your reach to users who interact on social media at different times.

With a list of social media updates that can be posted again and again, you’ll spend less time posting updates and more time engaging with those who are interested in them.

~ Philip is a freelance writer and an editor of an English bi-monthly. He is the owner of Philipscom which is a multi-niche page he writes about several topics like current affairs, environment, health, devotion, politics, social media, blogging etc.

I never used any promotional tools as such to share our content, instead I depended on manual sharing thru Facebook Google+ twitter, Linkdin Tsu, digg and a few others by placing a share button on the sidebar and at the bottom of the post.

Of course apart from social sharing I depended on some community platform for spreading the news about our posts. Indeed, that was a wonderful strategy I found in getting more traffic as well as responses.

Another wonderful strategy I followed is get in touch with influencers to share our notes. Getting or creating a good relationship with influencers is a tedious job and need lot of persistence and it takes a lot of time too.

I am sure that hard work will fetch needed results at the end of the tunnel! And surely they support and share our posts thru their pages once you get into their good book.

Building a solid relationship with the influences are a good point here, for this I used my comment strategy, in fact, my blogging journey started by commenting on fellow bloggers pages, and I can bet, if you post a constructive and relevant comment on the subject it will not only get the attention of the blog owner but also it will catch the attention of readers and visitors there.

I am sure if your comment is a thought provoking one surely that will work and people jump into your page. Here again this is a tedious process and you need to read a lot and equally lot of patience! In short, I can testify that my comments on different blogs made me a blogger!

Yes, I was not having any blog page of my own, in fact, I was a blogger without a blog! You can read that story here on this link. A Blogger without a blog!

And one more point or truth, I want to make here is that influencing influencers is no doubt a cumbersome job, but if you have patience you will reap the results.

Few of my roundup posts are a fitting example to such experience I gained through that strategy, and that fetches lot of shares from such influencers. One such post is : What others say about Philipscom.

~ Matt is a blogger, a podcaster and a best-selling author that loves helping people build successful businesses and blogs. In 2013 he co-founded THREE new companies with different partners.

The most successful action that I’ve taken with social media actually started off of social media. I created a blog post that mentioned other people.

The first time I did this, I created a post about the 7 bloggers that will make you rich. Once the blog post was written and live, I tweeted at the people I mentioned and shared the blog post with them.

I then shared it on Facebook and mentioned them in the post. The fact that I was talking about them made them want to share the post. Each of these influencers then helped me spread the post causing it to go a bit viral.

Now with every new blog post that my team or I create, we have rule to mention at least 2 people or brands in every single post.

That way we can inform those people or brands about the post and get them to share it as well. Influencer marketing and ego-bait have caused some of our biggest social media wins.

~ Ashley is the Founder of Mad Lemmings, a company that helps entrepreneurs and small businesses get more customers through their website

When I was first starting out with blogging and social media, it was very intimidating. There are so many people out there trying to get attention, so standing out can be a real challenge.

Gaining traction first happened for me when I did a post on “which social media and blogging influencers to follow”.

Such a post (or at least one where you mention and contact multiple influencers) can really get you on people’s radars, especially if you do it the right way.

You have to be careful to choose the right influencers (many of the ones I chose where too hard to reach) and to contact them in a non-spammy way.

This could be a quick mention on Twitter, or even a short email. Just don’t come off as needy or demanding.

Simply send a polite notification (proceeded by some interactions on their blog or social media is ideal). And always remember that this is the start of a relationship, not just a way to get your post shared.

So cutting a long story short: find some influencers in your niche, starting sharing their stuff, interacting with them on social media, and before you know it, you will be dragged up to their level and get that blogging or social media boost you were craving!

~ Swadhin is a freelance writer and content marketer for hire. He is a social media enthusiasts and is the founder of DigitalGYD.com, a popular social media marketing blog.

I think social media is just like the offline world, the more connections you make the more is your reach and influence. When I first began with social media I was amazed with the power of it.

Social media is powerful and it empowers you if you use it the right way. Here are two of my actions that give me the most traction on social media.

1) Build relationship with influencers as well as fellow bloggers.

I connected with more and more people. It was a planned one rather than a random connection. I connected with people in my niche.

Since I am a run a popular social media blog, I connected with social media enthusiasts. This had to be mixture of influencers in my niche as well as newbies and smaller blog owners.

To find the influencers, I use followerwonk to connect with Twitter influencers. Then I find their tweets and start following the people who have interacted with their tweets recently. This gives me a chunk of active tweeps as well as some follow back in the same niche.

2) Add value to your community.

When you have formed a community, you need to constantly add value to make sure you’re lovable. I share similar content as my community.

Breaking news in social media (my niche) and resources from influencers helped me get their attention soon.

~Ron is a full stack marketer, specialized in digital B2B marketing funnels and influence marketing campaigns. He is also a content marketing strategist dapulse, a project management solution for startups.

Social media is becoming more and more important when it comes to doing business.

Current studies are showing that 80% of individuals online in the US prefer to connect with a company through Facebook and other social media prior to doing business with them.

And that connection gained through social media is 100% more effective in landing a sale than any form of outbound marketing.

But figuring out to effectively use social media to gain traction and build an engaged following isn’t as intuitive as it should be.

These three tips can help you to build a following of real followers who engage with the content you post and are more likely to share your content, pursue your products and services, and recommend your business to others.

• Post Frequently, Post Consistently. If you’re not posting content then your followers are more likely to forget about you. But with regular posting, you keep yourself in your follower’s eyes, maintaining their interest in what you have to say and making them more receptive to your posts, as well.

• Post High-Value Content. This is key. What you post has to not only be accurate, but it has to matter to your followers. This makes discovering relevant and accurate content and curating your own high-quality content from reliable sources of paramount importance.

By consistently posting great content, you will attract new followers, keep your current followers interested and engaged, and encourage sharing of your content that draws more followers to you.

• Cross Promotion. You’re likely using more than one social media platform to promote your business (and if not, you should really consider using at least two.) So, take advantage of that expanded online platform that you have and cross promote that amazing content your curating through all of your social media platforms.

This not only creates consistency across your brand, but allows you to accomplish more through the effort you put into creating that content rather than developing distinct content for each social media site. Work smarter, not harder.

Laurie S Hurley The Social Networking Navigator

~ Laurie is a social media manager. She started her blog as a small, private coaching practice, but it has blossomed over the years to a full-service social media marketing and video marketing management company.

Understanding that I write content daily for my clients, the most successful action I have implemented have actually become a habit.

I utilize an editorial calendar which sorts my posts by social site and client and I stick to it! I created my own in Google Docs and my assistant has access, so we can both add content, move it around, and see what is scheduled when – and its color coded.

This saves me an incredible amount of time and allows me to add relevant content when I come across something for one of my clients in the moment, without bookmarking or saving anywhere else – all goes in one place.

Even if one is not a social media manager like me, having a plan in the form of an editorial calendar greatly decreases the amount of time one spends daily posting. Everything is planned in advance and is in the cloud so you have access anytime, anywhere.

It should be noted that just because one has a calendar, does not mean posting “in the moment” is not necessary. I utilize Google Alerts, in the form of one daily email, for current news and set my timer for 30 minutes to cruise the internet and other social sites for additional posts.

~ James is the Founder and Managing Director of SEO Sherpa, which along with our sister Google Adwords management agency called Click Jam make up the company Veravo.

Because the life cycle of a social media update is so short, perhaps the most leveraged social media action I’ve performed is re sharing my older content through scheduled tweets and posts.

There are some purest’s who believe that social media should be performed in real time, but I believe this does a disservice to my audience.

If all my updates were live and in real time two groups would miss out (1) new followers who were not around when I posted a link to an amazing blog post the first time and (2) followers who don’t happen to be in the same timezone and online when I’m awake and posting.

The steps…

1. I save links and updates I want to re share to a Google Spreadsheet.

2. Each week a member of my team drags several posts to a “To Share” tab on the spreadsheet.

3. Some fancy integration between Google Spreadsheets, Zapier and Buffer queues those post to be sent out at various times during the upcoming week.

These simple procedure performed once per week gives my audience exposure to some great content they may have otherwise missed out on.

~ Mike is a content marketing practitioner, blogger and the chief marketing officer at SiteSell. He teaches a holistic approach to content marketing that leverages blog content, social media and SEO to drive traffic, generate leads, and convert those leads into sales.

My single, most effective social media tactic started in 2013. At that time, I’d been working on my new blog and content focus (social media marketing) for about a year.

And while I’d had some very successful articles, I was still looking for consistent growth for the underlying business.

I’d recently rebooted my presence on Google+ by completely deleting all the circles I’d filled with random accounts, and had begun to refill new circles with highly targeted, brilliant people that I truly wanted to learn from.

As I began to foster those relationships, a few incredible opportunities came up that would change my business, and life, dramatically. One of the integral features of Google+, at least back then, was Hangouts On Air.

People were using HOAs to not only communicate with each other, and with businesses, but also as a form of content broadcast, much like radio shows and podcasts.

My first HOA was a presentation on how to use Hootsuite tailored for a mastermind group of lawyers from across the country. Soon after, I was invited to be on Dustn.tv with Dustin Stout, one of those brilliant people I mentioned earlier.

By the end of 2013, I’d appeared on several more weekly broadcasts with ever-increasing audiences, and had clearly made a great impression, not just on the show attendees, but on the hosts as well.

I started appearing on one or two shows a week, always talking about various aspects of social media, or the tools I used to make things manageable.

And it was that exposure which propelled my reputation, and business, incredibly quickly throughout 2014. And I continue to leverage that technique to this day.

My most successful action on social media lately has used a combination of Twitter, and the amazing content marketer tool from Sujan Patel.

If you haven’t tried content marketer yet, it is a way to scan a page and send tweets, based on a template, to people on that page.

So for example, you write a roundup post of the top 40 bloggers to follow.

If you are strategic and mention their Twitter profiles on the page, you can then scan it afterwards with content marketer and literally in one click send out a tweet to all of them, letting them know you mentioned them in your post.

The engagement rate, RTs, and shares you get from letting people know you mentioned them is the highest I have ever seen and it consistently delivers time and time again.

Not to mention the tool saves you hundreds of clicks and tons of time!

So the next time you write a post, make sure to reach out to people and or brands that you mention! Content is king, but if nobody sees it, you’re just wasting your time.

~ Evgeniy is an Internet marketing professional who specialises in SEO and Social Media marketing. He is also Hope Spring’s volunteer Internet Marketing guru and webmaster.

1. Mention an influencer in blog post. Usually when I write articles I try to mention some blogger/marketer who have very big authority on social media. Once my post is published I send them a message informing that I mentioned their name/post in my article. Very often they retweet, share my blogpost and send me loads of traffic.

2.Convert people from one platform into another. When someone shares my post on Facebook I contact them and ask to do the same on other social networks: LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+. Of course they do not want to do that manually for each network. So be sure that you have social share buttons on your site.

3. Add a picture. A picture’s worth a thousand words. According to the researches by adding a photo album, image or video to your social media post you canincrease engagement by 180%, 120% and 100% respectively?

4. Think about best time for your posts. The best way is to repeat your posts from time to time because those who usually access social media only in the evening time will not scroll their feed till the morning posts and vice versa.

5. Don’t add too many hashtags. Posts with too many hashtags look a bit spammy and can’t guarantee that more people see it. 1-2 hashtags is perfect.

~ Camilla blogs at 99 Smart Ideas, where she writes practical and science-backed articles about how you can become motivated, focused and productive in your daily work.

When I was first starting out on social media to grow my blog, I wrote a blog post where I featured a bunch of startups.

Then I emailed them and told them I’d just promoted them. Every single startup wants free publicity — even if it comes from a new blog with no readers. At the same time, they might have a good amount of followers on their social media channels.

In my case, the startups I wrote about loved what I did for them and I got a huge amount of shares on Facebook from that (even though I was pretty clueless in general).

A bit later, I read “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right-Hook” by Gary Vaynerchuk. The main point of this book is that to really grow your business on social media, you should give, give, give, then take. Rinse and repeat. It made total sense!

I realized that the #1 thing you need to do to get your name out there on social media is to first give value to others. This approach has never failed me.

~Dragos is a serial online entrepreneur and a personal development fanatic. He is a self-published author, with 9 titles on Amazon, Kindle and iBookStore.

One of the most useful marketing actions I did, which resulted in a wave of attention from social media and the blogosphere, was something I did a few years ago.

Its ripples are still going on strong. It’s called “massive guest posting” and it goes like this: you start by thinking about a series.

Do your homework on some topic you really know and come up with a post in 5 to 7 installments. Now, you usually will post this post series on your own blog, one article per day, or every two days.

But with massive guest posting you ask in advance a few fellow bloggers to host your blog post.

You ask them nicely to post them at the same time, and you link in each blog post to the rest of them (people will know that in order to read all the articles from the series, they’ll have to visit all the blogs).

Like this, the hosts have an audience multiplied by 7, and you get audience from 7 different blogs. Of course, there are a few quirks you have to solve, but I did this in the past, so if you want to know more about this technique, we can get in touch at http://dragosroua.com/contact.

~ Steve is the founder and CEO at AXZM. He is a growth engineer, public speaker on the topics of strategy, marketing and design.

There has never been a silver bullet, at least for me. You have to be in it for the long haul and constantly provide value to realize success through social. It’s a marathon, not a race.

The thing people need to understand about social is that it is just one piece of a larger picture in your marketing mix. If you are using social correctly, you are hyper aware of all the touch points your customers / audience use when interfacing with you and / or your brand.

You really have to start with a clear set of goals and put authenticity and engagement at the forefront of your strategy. If you don’t have a clear strategy for the content you are creating (across all channels) you are destined for failure.

The combination of creating high quality content that solves a specific problem for the audience you are targeting, while also curating the best information relevant to your industry with consistency and a rock solid attribution model almost always fruits positive results.

One of my favorite new tools is Snip.ly, which let’s you add a Call To Action to all your social updates. This dramatically increases the chances for you to bring the people who click on those shares back to your website.

Once they are there you can offer a free download, white paper, webinar, etc… with a Pay With a Tweet button or opt-in form to get access to those assets so you accelerate your chances of

1. getting your content shared while also

2. building your email list.

This type of closed loop marketing with social is no doubt where things are headed.

~ Andy is a web strategist and co-founder of Orbit Media. He is also a speaker, content marketer, environmentalist and author.

The best choice I ever made in social media was removing the social media icons from the header of my website. This might sound crazy. But let me explain.

I love social media. It’s an amazing networking tool, a great source of traffic and a critical tool for listening and research. But you can get all of those benefits without putting big colorful social media icons in the header of your website.

Think about it. These buttons are really just candy-colored exit signs. Do you really want your visitors to click them? If they do, they arrive at a place…

Filled with advertisements

Loaded with distractions

Closer to your competition

Farther from your lead generation form

Really, adding those buttons is just bad social media integration. If you really want to add social media icons to your website, put them in the footer, and don’t make them colorful.

~ Felix is an entrepreneur and inbound marketer. He is specialized in SEO, social media, conversion rate optimization, email marketing and traffic growth.

What works best for me is share and promote awesome content. Whether it’s my own content or someone else’s articles, I only share great pieces of content.

This way, I can transform my followers from a simple figure on my social media statistics, into real fans.

I want to give them a real reason to follow me, even if they don’t know me personally. I use this for my personal account and for the pages I moderate.

These are several methods I use to find sharable content

1. For articles on my website, I check Google Analytics and see what posts get the most visits, have a low bounce rate and high average time per visit. These posts are my best ones, according to my readers.

2. Google Analytics can also help me find my best articles from third-party websites. To do this, I check the articles that are sending the most referring traffic. If a visitor reads my article and then visits the link I’ve left in the author bio, it means they enjoyed it and were intrigued by my writing.

3. To find great articles written by other people I useBuzzSumo. The tools shows me content that’s performing great on social media for the keywords I’m interested. Aside from this tool, I also useMonitor Backlinksto find articles or infographics that earn a lot of backlinks.

For my own articles, the ones that have proven to be best, I also create Facebook ads to promote them even more. That’s because I know people already like my articles, and all I have to do is get more exposure on them.

~ Kara is a writer, speaker, and breast cancer survivor. Her mission is to encourage women to embrace the perfectly imperfect and create a life they love, leaving impossible standards behind.

Exhausted from an intense work day in NYC, I hopped on the train one evening to head back to Washington DC, opened my laptop and discovered that a blog post I had shared (one I had written and stored for several months in a “do not publish” folder) had gone completely VIRAL.

At least VIRAL for me. Because, my blog is small. Is yours? It had gotten almost 4K Facebook likes and hundreds of shares. I also received more than 300 comments from people who basically THOUGHT I WAS COMPLETELY INSANE.

My strategy behind this post? VULNERABILITY and HONESTY. That’s it. I was simply being me and sharing a snippet from my personal life – the little tiny secrets I keep from my beautiful babies.

This post so resonated with people that it was translated into other languages and shared with women across the globe. And those women picked up their computers and wrote to me, sharing their own tiny little secrets with a complete stranger.

Admittedly, the post was a little edgy. But, that’s me in a nutshell. A little edgy. I CALL IT LIKE I SEE IT. Something cancer has taught me. And that’s what I learned from this post – to just continue to share myself.

So, whether you are writing or speaking, or simply sitting around your dinner table, please SHARE YOURSELF. BE VULNERABLE AND HONEST WITH YOUR TRIBE. What you get in return, perhaps a viral post or maybe just some awesome love from a person who rules your world, is totally worth it.

~ Tad helps people with blogs, social media and search both in German and English. He has been online publishing for more than 18 years.

My “most successful action on social media that gained me the most traction” was to be radically honest. It was about showing my vulnerability. It was about admitting mistakes.

I had written an article like I did hundreds of others but this time I wasn’t speaking of success all the time. I didn’t explain “how to” and why everything worked perfectly or how I improved and optimized things.

It was a deeply personal summary of a decade of hard lessons learned. It resulted in a social media spread far beyond my hitherto already successful posts I often had. Instead of hundreds of social media shares I got ca. 5+ thousands of them:

You can still look that up on BuzzSumo albeit the numbers are not complete IMHO.
https://app.buzzsumo.com/research/most-shared?type=articles&result_type=total&q=http:%2F%2Fpositionly.com%2Fblog%2Fseo%2Fseo-mistakes&page=1

It seems that BuzzSumo only counts shares from the last 365 days. Still it was by far my most successful post of all time ironically as it was dealing with failure.

No other post of mine before that and ever since had more than 1k shares. One reason may be that I only write for small blogs but the article that went almost viral was published on a tiny blog from Poland as well.

Why did this radical honesty work? People are tired of all those smiling faces telling them how’s everything is fine while it is not. Some things work, other don’t.

Everybody is dealing with setbacks. An authentic account using a decade as a time frame free of marketese was a welcome vacation from the buzzwordy gibberish content full of stereotypes.

Apparently on social media people want real people with all their quirks and issues not just Photoshopped beauties showing flawless skin. Everybody knows that they are fake.

Take off your Disney fairy mask and tell people what’s really going on. Nobody is believing in Santa on the Internet anymore.

~ Ryan is the founder of Blogging From Paradise, where he teaches people how to earn money from blogging, generate more traffic, all that while traveling to exotic places.

My most successful action on social media is talking to people without adding links.

Asking questions, sharing answers, talking sports or weather, sending tweets and Facebook updates about blogging (without links) and basically being how a human being would be offline.

I think how I’d chat offline; would I drop links? Not unless I had mental problems. Not unless I was a soulless shill. Nope. Nobody talks like that. People chat about stuff.

Don’t get me wrong. I share all types of links throughout the day. I share links to my blog posts, to other blogger’s posts and to eBooks. I do however mix in chatty tweets to prove I am human and NOT a selling machine. Here are some ideas for affiliate productst.

Social media = talking media. Social media = chatting media. Social media does not equal “endless selling” media. Social media is not a tool you use to get stuff.

It’s a tool you use to give stuff and to get stuff. Sell away! By all means, were entitled to be paid for our products and services on social and we should!

If you’re afraid to sell on social you have money and success mental blocks, which you need to clear…..but…..act natural, chat about life, be engaging, ask questions about your niche and share answers with your audience.

Talking without linking every single time sure hasn’t hurt me and my social media campaign.

Ana Hoffman Traffic Generation Cafe

~ Ana is the founder of Traffic Generation Cafe. She writes about various ways to increase website traffic like search engine traffic, social media traffic, networking, as well as how to convert that traffic into subscribers and buyers.

The smartest thing I’ve ever done on social media was… being present.

Just being there to respond to mentions, comments, questions – there’s nothing like people knowing they can rely on you to be there for them.

And if they know you are there for them, they are there for you – they take your content to the ends of social media and back.

Tools are great; unfortunately, they automate the LIFE out of social media.

They do work, but the results you get from automated social media?… well, they match the amount of effort you put into it. Want meaningful results from social media?

~ Ashley is a private yoga instructor for busy women. She teaches her clients and readers what it takes to live a healthy life in the modern world with yoga.

My most successful action on social media that has always gained me the most traction is to be myself. No one wants to be promoted to so when I write posts that sound promotional, I notice that people are more likely to ignore them.

But when I write about something that has happened to me, that contains emotion, that is real and relatable, then people pay attention, share, click, comment, and engage.

I used to manage social media for clients, but I quickly realized that I could never be my client and what I wrote would never get as much traction as what my client wrote from his or her heart.

Celebrities that do their own social media get way more traction then the ones who pay someone to manage social media for them. So I stopped managing other people’s social media and have redirected my energy to my own.

As with anything in life, there’s a fine balance we must find to build a trusting relationship with our people.

~ Andrew writes on his blog about local search optimization, small business marketing and search engine optimization strategy.

I made this Hitler video about Google Search Plus Your World.

I came up with this idea because I saw the Google Search Plus Your World announcement and I thought it was the most ridiculous name and then I thought “this would make a great Hitler video” then I spent the next four hours putting it together. Beats working

~ Luke is a full time internet marketer specializing in social media, SEO, marketing and social media marketing.

1-> Realising my passion and goal was to help OTHERS succeed on social media over wanting to make money online. Once i realised I got much more satisfaction from helping others, money became a massive byproduct of that compared to when my goal was to just try and make money.

2-> When i changed all my sales material to focus on the BENEFITS rather then the features. e.g. how I can help someone double their traffic to their social pages and convert 30% greater starting today (benefit) vs how i have a cool tool that allows you to find viral content online and repurpose it (feature). people buy on Benefits over features 🙂

3-> Connecting with the right people around me and building the right relationships. I connected with the top internet marketers by seeing what THEY were doing, applying it to my business, letting them know how appreciative i am of it and so on to make a organic relationship first 🙂

~ Max is a blogger, author, public speaker and life coach. He is the founder of The Blind Blogger and Midway Market Place.

It was winning a guest post on Aha-Now.com about two years ago. You can look it up. I should know the date myself. It was called Life Lessons From A Blind Blogger and got the most comments and shares of anything I’ve ever written.

Part of it was being featured on a platform with a loyal invested audience. Part of it was being pushed by the site owner Harleena Singh to write a truly excellent post. And to think I only got it because I wanted to make sure I could use her new and improved site.

She came back from a blogging break and established a new group on her site called the aha now blogging community or abc for short. She said that whoever was the most active would win a guest post. As a blind computer user i hate change.

Generally, new versions of websites means finding new ways to do things. This means more time to do the same jobs. However, I had been following Harleena for a while and knew she was worth the investment.

So, I tried it all out. I sent friend invites. I posted to my status section. I shared blog posts both mine and other people’s. I wasn’t trying to win. It just happened.

And this post and the reaction to it gave me the confidence to declare myself as the blind blogger and start offering coaching and speaking. It lead to my starting a second website and blog. And it lead to so many new opportunities. People really identified with the post.

So, do good work and promote the heck out of it. Better yet do great work and have amazing friends who will promote the heck out of it for you.

~ James started his first blog when he was only 11 years old. Now, after 7 years he teaches people how to make money online, by sharing his tips and tricks on his blog.

If I had to pick one thing that transformed my social media experience, it would be shifting the focus on why exactly I was using these platforms.

Far too many people focus too much time on using their pages either for traffic to their websites, or as an engine for direct sales.

While this is certainly possible, this is a task far better suited for pay-per-click advertising where you can directly measure your ROI. Therefore, I had to abandon this idea as my page’s primary goal.

I wanted my followers thinking about me and my brand regularly, and this action itself indirectly leads to more sales down the line, not to mention an increase in organic likes.

I upped my posting schedule from 3x a day to 10x a day, from simply sharing links to my content to sharing any thoughts that represented my values, and the results have been incredible.

Not only am I reaching far more people and getting far more clicks to my website, but those I have connected with are far more engaged with my brand and have been getting their friends on board as well.

In a time where internet marketing is becoming more and more competitive, it’s imperative that our brands are on our potential customer’s minds regularly. Social media is a great way to achieve this if we focus on the right goals.

~ Harris is skilled in SEO, SEM, content strategy, web analytics, social media marketing, branding, public relations and other aspects of internet marketing.

My most successful action on social media has by far been Facebook advertising, specifically for B2C retail products. It is amazing how well you can target your audience once you know exactly who they are (which sometimes can be the hardest part).

Once I have the data-driven personas in mind, I usually test into their likes and interests as part of the advertising. Alternatively, look-alike audiences can also be viable if you find overlaps.

At a very minimum, I set up 3 campaigns to focus on 3 levels of engagement. The first and most important, is a targeted campaign to earn likes and visibility.

This is purely to get brand awareness and for potential customers to “opt in” to seeing your content in the future. This campaign is always on because it keeps a fresh stream of potential customers coming in.

Once honed in, I get likes for cents on the dollar (not to mention the satisfying notifications that your ads are performing better than 98% of similar ads).

The second Facebook ad campaign is for ongoing engagement with your audience. This one is specifically targeted to your fans only, because they’re familiar with your brand and can keep costs low (again because it is only shown to current fans).

The purpose of this one is to keep your brand in the back of their mind and demonstrate your expertise in the field. All that good content you’re creating needs to be distributed anyway, so I like to make sure fans can see it. The paid posts here are purely for informational/entertaining purposes.

Finally the third ad campaign is specifically for conversion. Once your audience is familiar with your brand (campaign 1), can clearly see you’re an authority in your field (campaign 2) it’s time to get them to buy.

If there is seasonality or other waves of interest I scale up this one as needed. The ad campaign is to drive to a contact page or “sell” page on the website. This is also targeted only to fans of the page to ensure the audience is qualified.

BONUS CAMPAIGN! Did you think that was all? Of course not. The last and best campaign leverage Facebook tracking pixels on your website.

I use these to create two audiences: those who have been to the website, and those who are customers (cookie placed at checkout).

This way, I can create another campaign specifically targeted to website visitors but not customers. These are the folks who almost reached purchase, but might need a little incentive (discounts and special offers work great here).

~ Servando started blogging back in 2006 and finally focused on Affiliate Marketing in 2011. At Stream SEO he is publishing his journey and adventures related to SEO, Social Marketing techniques and mobile marketing.

The best thing I’ve ever done on Social Media to gain traction was to learn how to use Ads. Either FB or Twitter ads, both can be very powerful or very profitable if you learn how to use them.

Facebook is probably the best platform to get started because of the interest targeting and volume of people they have online every month.

By learning how to do so I was able to grow small niche websites from 0 to 1000 visitors per day in just a week (Facebook ads case study I did a couple years ago).

Also it has worked great in the conversions area, getting me up to 200-300 new subscribers (leads) per day just with ads. That’s something most new bloggers would just dream to see per month.

There’s a lot of money to be made with FB Ads, so if you’re still chasing your organic traffic and fan pages, make sure you give it a try and stop hating paid traffic.

~ Chris is a blogger that makes money online with niche sites, using SEO and specializing in Adsense. He has been making a full-time income from his niche sites since 2013.

My most successful social media campaign was a quiz I created for one of my niche sites that went semi-viral.

This was in 2014 when I first read about a new website called Playbuzz.com. They were the “hot topic” in the viral marketing world since they were less than a year old and passed BuzzFeed and Huffington Post in Facebook shares.

The way they did it? They doubled down on viral quizzes.

They had noticed that BuzzFeed quizzes always did amazingly well on Facebook. The top shared content on Facebook were always quizzes.

But they also noticed that BuzzFeed was slowing down on quiz production since they didn’t want to keep publishing the same style quiz over and over again.

Playbuzz decided to do the opposite. They started off creating nothing but quizzes and their growth in traffic and Facebook shares was incredible.

So I decided to gives Facebook quizzes a try. I put together a short little quiz, BuzzFeed-style using silly multiple choice questions and funny gifs as images.

It took me only about 30 minutes to create the thing, and I decided to boost it with $100 in ad spending.

~ Daniela helps bloggers find their superpowers, define their voices, grow their audiences and make readers fall in love with their blogs.

My most successful social media action has been to create a Facebook group and then grow it with free challenges.

My Facebook group, Blogging on Your Own Terms, has 3500+ members in it at this point, and it’s allowed me to create a thriving community around my blog.

As opposed to emails, that most people don’t respond to, Facebook groups invite interaction.

Because of my group, I have been able to build real relationships with people who resonate with me and my message, and I’ve grown my blogging membership site as a direct result of those relationships.

Facebook groups are the most organic way that I’ve found to grow my audience and visibility. Once a group becomes large enough, Facebook starts to automatically share it with people who might be interested.

(As opposed to pages, where you have to pay to play.) Plus, group members are excited to share with their friends who could benefit from the group as well.

If you are thinking of starting a Facebook group and afraid of starting small, do it anyway. Once it starts to grow, the benefits are enormous for your blog and business.

~ Kash is the co-founder of Best Expert Reviews. She compare various products and suggest various options based on price and features on her website.

My best social media action has been starting a Facebook group. Facebook with over a Billion users is the best place to get traffic to your website. When you start a Facebook group, you get like minded people who join the group who are your potential customers and you also create your “tribe” of people who vouch for your products or services. My best tips for a Facebook group are:

1. First optimize your group as you would do your site. That way you will get members from facebook search

2. Engagement: Keep the engagement as high as possible. The higher the engagement the more Facebook suggests to other people interested in the same thing

3. Be active in all related groups: That way when you interact with people, facebook later shows them your group in suggested

4. In my email thank you page after sign up, i recommend the group. I get a lot of traffic from that

~ Jan writes about WordPress on his blog and he teaches new bloggers how to build scalable businesses online.

My most successful action on social media was to start my own Facebook group, called I Use WordPress.

I market that group to my audience, online entrepreneurs who use WordPress as platform for their online businesses.

In that group, I’m sharing helpful information with its members, e.g. tutorials, reviews, or curated content.

Mark Bowness, one of the speakers on my summit taught me this strategy during his presentation. This group is a steady channel of marketing and helped me generate quite some revenue.

The main focus of that group is providing helpful content though. I’m selling very rarely to this group, most of the time I’m just answering questions and sharing information. It’s a great platform to build my brand.

~ Nick is an author and online entrepreneur that helps people build job-free income streams. His blog has a growing community of aspiring and part-time entrepreneurs, where he also hosts the top-rated Side Hustle Show podcast.

I’d say my most successful social media action involved Facebook.

First, I’m been proactively “unfollowing” strangers — people I may have known 10 or 15 years ago but have no real relationship with anymore.

I don’t need updates on their daily lives, and doing so cleaned up my feed so I spent less time scrolling through and more time on the people I do have current relationships with.

The second action was discovering and becoming involved in Facebook groups.

There are groups on just about every topic imaginable, from self-publishing to podcasting to blogging to ecommerce.

Finding those groups and becoming an active member of the community has been social media time well-spent.

~ Andrea helps newbies, solopreneurs and small business entrepreneurs at her blog, where she delivers content focused on strategies, tips, resources and tools for branding, design and visual marketing mastery.

The most successful thing I’ve done on social media to help propel my brand was starting a private Facebook group for my subscribers and readers.

Creating the group took some of the pressure off of me to be the ONE person connecting everyone via email and social tagging.

The group allows my peeps to get to know one another {there have been some amazing collaborations and projects that began with people meeting in our Society}, AND it allows me to provide a ton more value and engagement to my badass.

Now they have a clear path to talk to me, tell me how I can help them, and to get my feedback.

There’s been so much awesomeness that’s come from The Badass Solopreneur Society, I can’t wait to see how much more I can do with it in 2016 and beyond.

~ Erik is a professional blogger and freelance writer since 2010. He has created and published more than 500 articles on the Web. He is also a traveler that has visited over 30 countries around the world.

So far, it generated more than 36k impressions, with many likes, retweets and clicks to my site. See:

This is a simple and quick action that most of the Twitter users forget to take (even many “expert” marketers), but gives a huge visibility to your audience. Plus, your new followers will likely visit your profile and that will be among the first things they are going to notice.

~ Sean is the CEO and Founder of SEO Hacker and Qeryz. A start-up, data analysis and urgency junkie who spends his time inspiring young entrepreneurs through talks and seminars.

I think that the most successful social media campaign I ever did was to run a contest for a client back in the day. That might not be applicable anymore though. So I’ll just tell you how I’m able to do it for myself over at Twitter.

If you check out my Twitter account @SEO_Hacker, you’ll notice that I have a good number of followers. The hack that I put in was simply to tie up my Twitter with Buffer and tweet out the best of what I read every week.

People get it, share it and consequently, follow my account – or some of their followers follow my account.

Twitter has always been my number one source of social media traffic over at SEO Hacker because of that hack coupled with recurring tweets about my most-read articles at the SEO Hacker blog.

Of course, all my Tweets should have value or else I lose followers. That’s just how life goes in the Twittterverse.

Really seeing my first surge of social media growth took some time and experimenting. Much of the advice I’d seen said to post consistently and share the content of others, which I did.

However, that was only leading to 1-2 new followers per day on Twitter and a few on Pinterest, which I wasn’t happy with.

The first big surge of followers I experienced on Twitter came with my first high-value workshop. I co-hosted with a fellow blogger and good friend, meaning we were advertising to each other’s audiences and providing a free training.

This resulted in a high number of shares and a lot of people really seeing the value I could provide for the first time. Because of that my followers started increasing much more quickly.

To keep those followers I do my best to interact authentically, rather than only scheduling posts to share.

I know that my favorite people to follow are those who share random, fun little things throughout the day so I’ve been trying to do that more. Those posts are the ones that get the most interaction, so it definitely seems to be a good route to take.

So my best advice is to be consistent, provide value, and be the real you!

~ Umair is the founder of My Tech Mag. He writes about blogging, social media marketing, SEO and he teaches others how to make money online.

The method which worked best for me is knowing my target audience and then promoting my content on Social media when the target audience is most active. It’s not a rocket science, it’s easy to do it yourself.

The only thing you need is some knowledge about “Which kind of audience you are targeting?” and a simple social media sharing tool to schedule your shares according to your Audience.

I personally use Bufferapp for this purpose and it works best for me. I have set the timings for my social media shares, and then I top up my buffer app account once after two or three days.

Then it keeps sharing my content on Social media on the described timings. This helped me to get maximum ReTweets and Shares on Twitter and Facebook respectively.

Another tactic I am following is to promote my content multiple times on a single platform. It’s not a sin to reshare your blog posts multiple times, even mostly people don’t notice it for the first time.

These both actions worked best for me, in order to attract maximum traffic from Social media.

~ Corinne is a professional freelance writer and blogger. She has worked with many businesses, helping them use content to increase their online exposure.

I know this is going to sound like a non-answer, but consistency is what works the best for me regarding social media.

I find that posting and engaging daily (even for just 15 minutes) helps me build my followers more than anything. I notice that when I don’t get on social media enough, especially Twitter, my followers will drop.

On the other hand, if I share and comment consistently, my followers immediately go up.

I like to schedule time each morning to get on social media, check updates, thank people and share some new posts. Then I schedule posts and share more of my friends and colleagues.

Buffer is great tool for scheduling posts, and Triberr is great community platform for sharing other people’s posts, and getting mine shared as well.

Ironically the most successful action I took that resulted in the most traction was non-action. I stopped doing “social media things” and focused only on highest-impact website actions while automating or paying for social media actions.

While the potential of social media is alluring, it’s rarely the highest impact use of your time. Between zero organic reach on Facebook and the dozens and dozens of social platforms, it’s easy to spend a lot of time doing actions that really don’t matter.

Instead, I focus on creating things that my fans will share; automating the mechanics of social media; and spending the time I save on the few things that should not be automated – writing a personal email; responding to DMs; building low-cost targeted paid ad campaigns.

~ Venchito is the CEO and Co-Founder of SharpRocket, a link building company that provides high quality link building services to SEO clients based in UK, US and Australia.

Using ManageFlitter for Twitter alliance and engagement.

This social media platform helps in manufacturing tweets that get traction from target audience.

By scheduling posts at best times where followers are likely to be online, you’ll have more than chances of increasing your Twitter engagement (retweets and favorites).

Another built-in feature of ManageFlitter that differentiates itself from its competitors is the ability to filter potential followers/influencers by audience potential (min. number of existing followers, number of tweets per day, etc..)

This enables you to follow industry influencers and bloggers that are likely to engage with your tweets.

Because I target software companies with my content marketing services, I set up a filter in Hootsuite to monitor any tweets mentioning “software” or “small business.”

One day, I noticed a brand tweeting that they had recently launched. I responded with my congratulations, and within minutes, someone from the company had direct messaged me to talk about my marketing services.

From that one little tweet, I got a client. That’s the power of social media.

~ Chris got involved in web design in 1999 and has owned and managed web businesses since 2001. He now focusses his attention on Business Development and oversees the Search Engine Optimisation and PPC campaign management at Hit Reach.

We’ve seen the biggest surge in Twitter followers following guest posting and contributing on large industry sites we were invited to post on and events we’ve spoken at.

This remains a great source for gaining well informed, genuine followers.

I don’t have evidence of the quality of these type of followers vs ones gained from say a giveaway on Twitter using a follow and RT tactic but I would imagine in the long run they are more valuable.

~ Russ is an SEO Advisor for Angular where he was employed for over 10 years prior to joining Moz as a Principal Search Scientist. He has been in the web design / development industry since 1997, and is highly sought after as a speaker and trainer at industry conferences.

I can’t point to a single social media action, but certainly can speak to a particular type of action that gains me the most traction – unique research.

Take some time and do some serious research on a question.

Come up with 5-10 talking points (short textual points, preferably with a statistic or two) and tweet those out.

When the community starts to see you as the source of information, and not just a curator, you will gain real traction.

The most successful social media action for me can be summed up in one word: Consistency. I try to post on a regular basis, especially when it comes to Twitter (my favorite channel).

This doesn’t mean you have to glue yourself to your social media channels, 24/7. Rather, you can use scheduling tools such as Buffer to have your content go out at predetermined times.

Consistency helps you build top-of-mind awareness with your audience, while building a following over time.

Mi Muba BeAMoneyBlogger.com

~ Mi is the founder of Be A Money Blogger. He teaches people how to become rich through blogging.

Improving my profile including my profile pic, timeline image and my bio helped me a lot to get more traction.

For example on my Twitter account @BAMoneyBlogger I changed my profile pic with a smiling face and in last three months I got nearly 1200 more followers without any paid or free campaigning.

Secondly after analyzing the response level on different social media to my posts I altered my automated posting schedule as most convenient for my followers and now I am receiving huge number of likes and reshares on my posts.

Chris is the founder and CEO of Kubb&Co. He is an entrepreneur and marketer, passionate about startups and business.

On Snapchat. I recently did a Snapstory where I informed my Snapchat followers that I was releasing a secret video only for my newsletter subscribers and then showed the link where people could subscribe.

I’ve done similar types of calls to action on other social networks, but I’ve never seen such an incredible response as I did on Snapchat that day. 20 people subscribed within the first 30 minutes of the story being published.

~ Anna is a power influencer and social media strategist. As a Pinterest expert she helps businesses supercharge traffic and sales growth with Pinterest.

Most businesses don’t realize that if you know how to use Pinterest properly it can help you increase your ranking in Google’s search engine. What that means to you is more qualified traffic to your website or in your store.

Pinterest boards are indexed by Google – that does not happen on any other social media network. Pinterest can help you rank on the first page of Google in organic search under your most important keywords.

For example, if you google “Pinterest expert” or “Pinterest consultant” you will see White Glove Social Media rank on the first page of Google.

This is how businesses find me. I am the only Pinterest expert worldwide that so far has proven they have the know how to do this. I know the secret formula for ranking high on Google and I apply that to the businesses I work with.

~ Jane shares on her blog travel tips and motivational articles. She also writes about yoga and meditation

I made my biggest gains on social media through focus.

I’d read reports that Pinterest can give you huge returns even with relatively few followers, so I decided to focus my efforts completely on Pinterest.

I still maintain my other accounts, but I don’t put any effort into building those audiences. I’ve been working on my Pinterest account for about six months and I now have almost 10x the followers I started with.

~ Zac is an entrepreneur and a super affiliate, with nearly 20 years of experience in the online marketing space.

One of my most success “social media” plays was when I created a resource site that was focused around myspace and making it easy for people to add content to their profile page.

Yes, this is going back in time a few years when the social media space was just getting started, but it still applies today.

The site went on to generate over a million dollars and $800k in profit in just 4 months. The business model is still the same.

Create something of value, offer it to your audience and then figure our a way to monetize it as it develops.

Fabrizio Van Marciano Magnet4Blogging

~ Fabrizio is a blogger and digital marketer, that has over 5 years of experience as an active blogger, and over 10 years of experience as an entrepreneur and online business owner.

My most successful action on social media has been to pay less attention to those social outlets that were giving me nothing back, and more on the ones that were giving me results.

So for me Twitter and Google+ have been amazing. By increasing my activity and engagement on Twitter for instance, I’ve been able to make some truly valuable connections, which has opened doors to new business opportunities and a host of other great things.

Too many marketers are transfixed on the belief that they have to try and make every single social media site work for them. That’s more work than it’s worth in my book, so my advice is to find the ones that’s working for you and own it!

~ Ted is a leading social marketing strategist, keynote speaker, brand evangelist, and acting CMO of Brand Innovators.

Syndicate, syndicate, syndicate… share your content via all social channels always including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, which also makes it easy for others to share.

And don’t be afraid to do it more than once periodically sharing old posts via your social channels, especially those that were well received.

Create relationships with publishers who are looking for good content and will regularly repost yours. Also make it know that you encourage anyone to repost your content with attribution and a link back to the original post.

The most successful action I’ve taken on social media is actually to build relationships.

I’ve found that I can push out (great!) content to my heart’s desire, but the key to getting that content to find traction is building both reciprocal relationships with other amazing bloggers out there, and also building relationships on social media with the people who follow my work.

This has enhanced my work and progress in so many ways – for example, my readers tweet or FB me ideas about content they’d like to see, and tell me what really speaks to them, so I can focus more on those topics.

My peers share my content, and suggest ideas as to how to market my work more effectively.

I can’t stress the importance of relationships enough in the online world – just because you’ve never met in person (yet!) doesn’t mean those relationships aren’t a great addition to your work and life.

~ Bryan is the co-founder and CMO of IdealSpot. He is an internationally recognized authority and pioneer in online marketing, improving online conversion rates, persuasive content, and persona marketing.

The most successful social media action I have taken is to foster several of the relationships I have made online and brought them to the real world.

Through those relationships I have secured several six-figure consulting deals, delivered keynotes across the globe and most importantly shared amazing memories with new friends.

~ Christi is a social media consultant, coach, and strategist that maximizes social media marketing dollars for companies on various budgets. She is also a digital marketing consultant and international public speaker.

By following and engaging with my targeted audiences on a daily basis, complimenting, congratulating, asking questions and being responsive to their needs or concerns ongoing continues to be my secret weapon.

These tactics are especially important for sites such as Linkedin. In the end, people want to know that a real person is there and always will be, especially in today’s fast paced digital environment.

I continue to treat profiles just as I do the people behind them as if they are within arm’s reach in the same room.

~ Mike is the president of Nifty Marketing and Nifty Law. He is a successful speaker, author and investor.

Talking to people compared to always broadcasting. On my social channels I try to be a conversationalist compared to just a megaphone.

This leads to making REAL friends. Then, the real friends are more likely to share when I do have something worthwhile.

This method has added up to 1000’s of shares from real influencers across more than one piece of content.

M. Shannon Hernandez The Writing Whisperer

~ Shannon is a content strategist, copywriter, speaker and trainer, author. Her mission is to help heart-centered small business owners and heart-centered authors find their brand voices, share their unique stories and gain more visibility.

I spend a lot of time building one-on-one relationships on Facebook.

Once I connect with someone, either after an event, or in a group, I take that conversation off-line and set up a call where we can get to know one another and learn how we can support each other.

It has been a game-changer for my business! People love to talk about themselves, but there really is magic in one-on-one conversations.

This tactic takes time, but building quality relationships is a core value in my business, and these phone conversations have led to client work, referrals, and lasting friendships.

~ Brenda launched Ariad Partners after 20 years of marketing, sales management, and product management experience working for both start-ups and Fortune 500 companies.

There are many examples of successful social media campaigns, but if I have to boil it down to the most important, I have to say the one action that has gained me the most traction is consistently sharing high quality content.

If there is a second, almost equally important action, it’s interacting with people (retweeting, commenting, etc.). These seem boring, I’m sure, but it is what works.

I can look at my analytics and see a drop when I’m not sharing content and a rise when I am. I don’t have 30k followers who pay no attention to me. I have 3,000 very engaged followers. That’s what you want!

~ Ileane is a blogger, youtuber, podcaster and social media expert. Her blog is focused on blogging and writing tips, SEO, social media optimization and it’s packed with useful YouTube video tutorials.

I’m always a little cautious when responding to questions like this because I think that people tend to look for an easy button or a quick answer.

Truth of the matter is I can’t point to one specific action that gained the most traction for me, other than to say that I’m just being myself.

I’ve always been a bit of a social butterfly even among my childhood friends. Most of them will still come to me if they need help with anything “techie” and I was the first one to start a blog and join social networks.

And just like my offline friendships, I’ve learned that building (and keeping) relationships takes time and sometimes it’s hard work! But in the long run, it can be really fun and ultimately very rewarding.

~ Dan helps B2B, SaaS, and tech companies win more qualified leads and shorten sales cycles with web copy and content.When not working, you can find Dan walking his gigantic 156-pound Great Dane, or cursing out his computer.

The most effective action I took was to get 100% clear on who my audience is.

Since then, I’ve had an abundance of LinkedIn shares, 20% growth in Twitter followers, and got published on a big-name blog at ContentMarketingInstitute.com.

Being clear on my audience means I have a precision understanding of exactly what they want to know more about. So I deliver more value and am far more helpful as a result.

By the way, my audience is CMOs at software, SaaS, and B2B companies with revenues from $10 – $100 million, and up to $1 billion. My job is to help them understand how to get more leads.

Using social media to engage with my audience is something I have avoided due to prioritizing my time for it below other activities.

However, when I have used social media the most successful action I have taken is setting up a community.

Whether it is a Facebook group or a Google group setting up a community around a specific problem/project and getting a like-minded group of people into the group to help each other has been the must successful action I have taken!

~Amy is a lifestyle alchemist and activation coach who helps people live all of themselves in their life, work and relationships.
Always tell a story. Of course, we have a limit to what we can say on Twitter, but make your tweet the first compelling line to a short (or long!) story, blog post or photo essay.

People are captivated by the things that resonate with them—spend a while working on that first sentence, and people will click through from a genuinely interested place—not just to see what #12 is on a click-bait headline.

~ Chantal blogs about everything related to the World of Work including HR, Workplace Culture, Leadership, Social Media, and Technology.

My most successful actions on social media I think can be attributed to two things. First is that social media takes time and consistency… it is rare to be an “overnight success” on it.

I work at building relationships and engaging with others when I can. I get busy like everyone else, and it can be hard to do at times, but building connections and being consistent is what helps me on all my social media platforms.

Social media is about being social. The other that I thing that I thing that has gained me the most traction is when I speak from the heart and share personal stories.

There are a couple of posts that I did about being bullied in the workplace and struggles and those seem to have resonated the most with my readers. So don’t be afraid to open up and share your experiences.

~ Anna is a Digital Marketing Strategist with a focus on Search Engine Optimization. She helps bloggers, entrepreneurs, and small businesses to optimize their websites and achieve better positions in search results

The most successful action on social media for me was a decision to share other bloggers and influencers content daily.

It does not only make my tweeter newsfeed more interesting and engaging for my auditory, but it plays a huge role in building relationships.

Another one is that I always find a time to say “Thank you” to anybody who shares my posts or retweets my tweets. A simple thank you back goes a long way.

Joining relative Facebook Groups and helping people out there is another great strategic action that won’t leave you without significant results.

~ Danny is a passionate SEO, influential writer and obsessed Life List completer. He is the author of the best selling book Search Engine Optimization Secrets and was the co-founder of Making it Click.

The most successful action I have ever taken with social media was to add checking my social media feeds to my morning routine.

Because I started checking these first thing in the morning, it meant that I heard about news events from social media first which made me much more inclined to react and interact socially in a authentic and raw way.

~ Anthony is an experienced author, professor, story and memory course creator. He has taught thousands of students in three different countries and worked as a memory coach and adviser to top ESL instructors and language school administrators around the world.

The first time I really felt the power of social media was when I took the time to use images properly on my profile post, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. I believe that that rich imagery made the click on social media irresistible.

When people saw the post and noticed the historical importance of the information and the contextual imagery I selected to expand the reader’s awareness of Matteo’s world, sharing followed naturally.

In sum, treat your content like a precious gem and your readers will follow.

~ David is the founder of Byte Of Data. He manage all aspects of the business to provide quality content to the online community via content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing and product creation.

It’s difficult to narrow down to one action as I believe a number of simultaneous actions have helped me gain traction on social media:

1) following people – they generally follow back, and if they don’t you can always unfollow at a later date

2) engaging with people – always taking the time to comment and ask questions to develop relationships

3) sharing relevant content – mixing up your own content with that of others to give a balanced timeline

Dagmar Khan Dagmar Khan

~ Dagmar is a stress-management specialist who teaches yoga.

Definitely the most successful action that proves a killer for me on social media is EDUCATION.

I am in body/ rehabilitation/ self-care world, and doing lost posts where I am teaching/ educating people on the science and workings of the body tends to give me the best results.

Amy Lynn Andrews Amy Lynn Andrews

~ Amy shares on her blog useful tips about blogging, social media, marketing, making money online and more.

My goal is to always provide a helpful tip or an actionable takeaway, but this can’t happen until I know what my audience will find useful.

So, constantly putting myself in their shoes is the first step to gaining traction on social media or anywhere online.

~ Vladimir is the Founder & CEO of Company Folders, an innovative presentation folder company that has won multiple awards, including ranking in Inc. 5000’s list of fastest-growing private companies in America in 2015 and 2016. He is a thought leader in print design and has published numerous articles including such publications as Forbes and Times.

The most important thing we do to gain traction on social media is use images with our posts.

We use bold, eye-catching colors and imagery to get the audience’s attention. Red is very useful for drawing eyes in because it creates a sense of urgency.

Text that implies urgency such as the word “free” works well, too.

In our experience, before and after images that show a comparison or transformation typically gain a lot of traffic, as well.

Marcus Svensson is responsible for the Growth of Albacross with previous experience as a founder and background in Mathematics from Stanford. Albacross is one of the top lead generation tools in Europe today and growing with hundreds of new companies every day. For best lead generation visit albacross.com

To succeed on any social media platform you need to perform the following action – to identify and explore your target audience. When establishing your business presence on social media it’s of high importance to understand your audience’ needs. You should identify their preferences and have an idea of what they would be interested in reading and learning. This will help you to interact with your prospects on a more intimate level.

Another aspect that you should always keep in mind is developing a social media strategy for each network you are involved in. Although Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. are all the social media channels, they operate differently and should be treated differently. In other words, what’s good for one social media network, is not always a win-win strategy to another platform

– Capsicum Mediaworks is the brainchild of Nirav Dave. After completing Masters degree in Graphic Designing from University of the Arts, London, Nirav honed his creative skills with established companies like Cinemax in India and Get Me In and Ticketmaster in the UK. Then, inspiration struck and led Nirav to move to Mumbai and start his own, unique web design agency by the name of Capsicum Mediaworks.

For me, one of the great ways to get maximum traction on social media is to create epic content that is worth sharing.

For instance, through my blog post on Killer WordPress Checklist: 101+ Amazing Steps to Launch A Website, I was able to not only get a huge number of social shares but was also able to increase engagement with my readers.

This one blog post had over 1 million views, over 3500+ shares and 15000+ PDF downloads with the numbers still ticking.

So the #1 effective social media action that is guaranteed to work is creating ‘Shareable Content.’

Here are some tips on how to create shareable content.

Brainstorm for a compelling blog topic. For this, you can use Google Trends to check out what is trending in your niche industry. You can also check out Facebook and Twitter Trends.

Once you have a blog post idea, do a thorough research on that topic. Go as in-depth as you can, because the more well-researched and beneficial an article is, the more you stand to gain from it.

Come up with a “click-worthy” headline and include relevant images & visual graphics in your blog post. For example, creating an infographic to go along with your content really works well in helping your content go viral.

Once you have done creating and publishing the content, the next step involves promoting it aggressively. Start with;

Emailing the link to your post to your email list subscribers.

Post it on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social channels such as Pinterest, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn & directories. If you are a part of a group on Facebook or Google, then sharing the content with relevant groups can also be beneficial.

Make sure to respond to all comments. I believe that interaction with your readers is very important. This helps improve engagement and tells your readers that you value their opinions.

Lastly, contact Influential Bloggers in your niche and ask them to share your blog post. Also, make sure to send a ‘thank you’ note to all those who share your post, as this can go a long way in building a relationship with them.

I have also found Reddit & Quora to be a useful platform and love to answer relevant questions on them, as I believe in sharing what I know with others so that they can succeed too!

Let me know your favorite idea in the comments and please share on social media!

ABOUT MINUCA ELENA

Minuca creates expert round-ups that provide quality content, bring huge traffic, get more quality leads and help bloggers connect with influencers. You can find her at her blog MinucaElena.com

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Such a huge roundup post on successful social media actions. I'm in need of some tips to engage my social media followers on all platforms so the tips here will certainly help me build up my online presence.

Hey, Great compilation. With social media being one of the best channels to engage and retain our niche, these tips from industry experts will be much helpful in implementing our social strategies more effectively.

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Incredible compilation. The bloggers and their tips are really helpful. We need to take some quality time to work on these tips. And, most importantly we need to focus a bit more on content and keyword research carefully to achieve success in blogging.